A Grid network is a collection of geographically distributed resources, such as storage nodes, super computers, and scientific equipment that are accessible to users over a network. These networks often deal with the transfer of large amounts of data (e.g., in the terabytes to petabytes range). A common traffic model used for such application is the dynamic traffic model. Requests are assumed to arrive sequentially, according to a stochastic process, and have finite holding times. The goal of the routing process is to minimize request blocking, where a user's request is primarily denied only due to lack of resources. Traditionally, the data transmission for an immediate reservation (IR) demand starts right after arrival of the request and the holding time is typically unknown. In contrast, an advance reservation (AR) typically specifies a data transmission start time that is sometime in the future and also specifies the desired holding time.
Advance reservation methods were originally proposed for electronic networks followed by optical networks such as the AR method described by J. Zheng, et. al. in “Routing and wavelength assignment for advance reservation in wavelength-routed WDM optical networks,” Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Communications, vol. 5, 2002, pp. 2722-2726 (2002). Since then, a number of continuous routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) heuristics based on static route computation have been proposed. These heuristics generally use the same basic structure, differing only in how they select the segment. They scan possible starting timeslots over all available lightpaths and choose a segment according to some criteria. Path switching for flexible advance reservation in electronic networks has also been proposed.
There is a need for a more efficient routing system and routing method for large data transfers over Grid networks